Streaming Review: "Platform" on Netflix
Noah Golden
If “Tiger King” is the Netflix material we need during this time of quarantine, the new Spanish film “The Platform” might be the material we deserve. It’s an ugly, violent, angry film made for an ugly, violent, angry time. It’s 2020 reflected back to us in a dirty, funhouse mirror. “Platform” is not a particularly fun or subtle film – there’s some very grisly blood-spattering and the central metaphor isn’t very coy or innovative – but it’s one worth searching out.
Originally titled “El Hoyo” (The Hole), this movie takes place entirely in the confines of a prison roughly shaped like Rapunzel’s tower. There are over 200 floors, with each one housing two prisoners. There’s two beds, a sink and a hole in the ground (Azegiñe Urigoitia did the wonderfully simple yet effective production design). We never see the world outside the prison or learn much about it. We’re probably in some near-future, the country or world is probably ruled by a fascist government, but details are sparse. The excellent “Black Mirror” episode “One Million Merits” came to mind, except the prison is fairly archaic, except for the all-knowing temperature control system. Televisions exist in this world, but screens are never seen.
In this prison, once a day, a huge feast is lovingly prepared by master chefs. Roasted meats, seafood, fresh vegetables, delicious pastries. They even ask new inmates what their favorite foods are, which get added to the menu. At mealtime, the feast is lowered level by level through a large opening in the floor. It stops for maybe five minutes and the inmates can eat whatever they want. If you get housed on floors 1 through 50, the food is plentiful. If you’re on 50 to 100, you get the crumbs and leftovers. And If you’re unlucky enough to be on a floor lower than 100, you get nothing but bones and empty plates. The trick is, the inmates are moved monthly and at random, meaning you could be eating comfortably on Level 30 one day and be starving on Level 160 the next. If the higher-ups contained themselves and only ate their share, there would be enough food for everyone, but of course, that doesn’t happen. The ravenous, desperate prisoners eat whatever they can with no thought to their neighbors downstairs.
The metaphor – about class structure and inequity – is, to quote a William Finn lyric, obvious but wise. It’s the “Sweeney Todd” allegory, cannibalism included, but shifted to a form that feels more like a shockingly gnarly “Twilight Zone” episode. “The history of the world, my sweet, is who gets eaten and who gets to eat” is reflected back in “The Platform’s” “there are three kinds of people: the ones above, the ones below and the ones who fall.” Yet, the parable wears its badge of unsubtly with pride. This isn’t “Mother” or “Annihilation,” films whose symbols are multifaceted and need to be peeled back like onion skin. This is Napoleon The Pig eating and drinking with the other farmers. Director Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia and writers David Desola and Pedro Rivero want their point made. They want people to listen. They want to blow shit up. I can’t blame them. The most intriguing art is often made by people like them.
The plot of “The Platform” is wonderfully tight and focused. Middle-aged Goreng (Iván Massagué) enters the prison voluntarily because he wants to stop smoking and earn a degree. A nicotine patch would have saved him a lot of headaches. On day one, Goreng wakes up on Floor 48 across the room from Trimagasi (Zorion Eguileor), an older man close to the end of his yearlong sentence. Each prisoner is allowed one item. Trimagasi has a self-sharpening knife. Goreng has a copy of “Don Quixote.” Although the novel is referenced, it is the musical version, “Man Of La Mancha,” that feels more spiritually connected. The prison setting, the threat of unjust government, the idea that a good story can make life worth living. In that musical, Quixote says, “when life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is and not as it should be.” By the end, I think Goreng would agree.
The first forty minutes or so are probably my favorite. Before the bloody and more action-heavy second half (and a fulfilling, if enigmatic, ending), “The Platform” is largely a series of conversations between two people. There are echoes of “The Dumb Waiter” or “Waiting For Godot” here – two souls stuck in limbo, trying to make sense of the insanity around them. Part of me wishes Desola and Rivero followed that path a bit further into absurdist territory and observed Trimagasi and Goreng’s increasingly tense cohabitation even longer. But except for a wonderfully strange monologue about infomercials delivered by Eguileor and some sharp dialogue early on, “The Platform” ultimately wants to be more Tarantino than Pinter, and Gaztelu-Urrutia executes it well. There’s barely a wasted moment in the film’s taut 90-minute running time.
Later, Goreng later finds himself with a new roommate and new sets of problems. We meet a former bureaucrat with a fatal diagnosis (Antonia San Juan) and a mysterious inmate (Alexandra Masangkay) who travels down on the descending buffet in search of her lost son. A plan for a coup is dreamed up, the glimmer of hope that both the prisoners and the jailers alike could see the error of their ways. Obviously, that’s easier said than done and the filmmakers aren’t as idealistic as Sir Quixote to suggest such a thing is possible. They are not offering solutions or platitudes. They are screaming into the void, telling people to wake up. We may be stuck in our prison. We may not have free will. We may not be able to walk out of our situation. But we can look up and down, see our fellow neighbors and try to work together.
Wrapped up in an entertaining if gory and grim package, “The Platform” is saying something worth hearing.
*Note: Netflix offers a subtitled and an English dubbed version of “The Platform.” I watched and recommend the Spanish-language, subtitled version.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.